A Thousand Acres: A Novel (30 page)

Rose said, “Let me get everyone.”

Jess said, “I’m skeptical of this. I want to register that.”

“Why?”

“Harold’s not a peacemaker. I think he’s got something up his sleeve.” He shrugged. “But I always suspect Harold, and he’s perfectly innocent often enough.”

I said, “Shouldn’t we wait for Loren?”

“He went to Mason City for something. I don’t know what. He left while I was over by Sac City.” He turned to me. “Ginny, I went to see that guy, the organic guy. I just got back. It was amazing. He hasn’t used chemicals on his land since 1964. He’s seventy-two years old and looks fifty. They’ve got dairy cattle and horses and chickens for eggs, but his wife only cooks vegetarian meals. They get great yields! Just with green manures and animal manure. The vegetable garden is like a museum of nonhybrid varieties. We had carrot bread and oatmeal from their own oats for breakfast, and carrot juice, too, and he had twenty different apple varieties in his orchard. I mean it was like meeting Buddha. They were so happy! I wish you’d come.”

I didn’t say that I’d had plenty to occupy me here.

“I feel right now like Harold’s got to come around. If he doesn’t come around, it’s like looking paradise in the face and turning away from it. It doesn’t seem possible to do that.”

“People do it all the time.”

“Do they? Do you really think they do?”

I didn’t answer. We got into the line. He went on, “Yes, I guess I did, back in the drinking days. Hmm.” But his whole demeanor said those days were gone now, nothing. I laughed to see him so joyful.

Carrot bread and oatmeal might have been welcome at that buffet
table. It was barbecued ribs, scalloped potatoes with ham, three kinds of potato salad, four meat casseroles, green beans with cream sauce three ways, two varieties of sweet corn salad, lime Jell-O with bananas, lime Jell-O with maraschino cherries, somebody’s big beautiful green salad, but with a sweet dressing. Jess took baked beans and some leaves of salad, then fell upon the carrot-raisin slaw and helped himself to half of it. He skipped the desserts.

Daddy was already sitting at the table. His plate looked like mine—ribs, potato salad, corn, macaroni and hamburger, more ribs. I said, in a friendly voice, “Well, Daddy, it looks like we picked all the same things.” He ignored me.

I sat between Pammy and Jess, across from Daddy, far from Ty. Rose sat on the other side of Jess and Pete at the end of the table. As soon as I sat down my heart began to pound. Some people we didn’t know began to pull out chairs, then they saw Harold looking at them and they backed away. Though we were uncomfortable enough to trade a few uncertain smiles, we settled ourselves, addressed our plates. I glanced at Ty’s face, at his plate, the wife habitually noticing what the husband was eating. He, too, had some of the carrot slaw. I looked at my own plate, the ribs looked good but would be messy. I poked my white plastic fork into the corn. All of this comes back to me as vividly as if these were my last impressions before an attack of amnesia. Harold’s voice rose above the noises of the crowd, and he said, “Hey!” and Jess Clark’s foot came down upon my own under the table, and his head snapped up.

I looked around. I had not noticed that the table Harold had chosen for us was right in the middle of the room, but it was.

Harold spoke up, as if he were making a long-awaited announcement, and said, “Look at ’em chowing down here, like they ain’t done nothing. Threw a man off his own farm, on a night when you’d a let a rabid dog into the barn.”

People at other tables pretended not to notice, except that Henry Dodge looked undecided about whether to get up from his seat or not.

“Nobody’s so much as come around to say I’m sorry or nothing. Pair of bitches. You know I’m talking about Ginny and Rose Cook.”

The minister decided to push back his chair. From across the room,
Mary Livingstone’s voice came, “Pipe down, Harold Clark. You’re talking through your hat, same as always.” Henry Dodge stood up. Harold didn’t say anything for a few moments, so Henry sat down again. Then Harold said, “I got their number. Nobody’s fooled me.” He leaned toward me. “Bitch! Bitch!” Now Jess stretched out his arm, his hand open at the end of it, and pushed Harold’s face backward. It was a strange gesture, violent and gentle at the same time. Harold, who had years of work behind him and was a strong man, couldn’t be pushed far. Daddy sat there with a kind of bemused look on his face. When a momentary silence fell, he said, “Their children put them there. I saw it myself.”

On the other side of Jess Clark, Rose heaved in her chair and said, “Daddy, just shut up. This has gone far enough.”

Pammy took my hand.

Henry Dodge stood up again.

Harold jumped up, knocking his chair backward with a crash. He stretched across the table and grabbed Jess by the hair and pulled him out of his seat, then, with his other hand, he grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. Jess said, “Shit!” Harold jerked him across the table. Styrofoam glasses of pop rolled every which way. He yelled, “I got your number, too, you yellow son of a bitch. You got your eye on my place, and you been cozying up to me for a month now, thinking I’m going to hand it over. Well, I ain’t that dumb.” His voice rose mockingly, “Harold, you ought to do this! You ought to do that! Green manure! Ridge till cultivation! Goddamn alfalfa! Who the hell are you to tell me a goddamn thing, you deserter? This joker ain’t even got the guts to serve his country, then he comes sashaying around here—” At this point, the minister had managed to get behind Harold and grab him. Jess socked his father across the face, and Harold fell back against the minister. Daddy shifted his chair out of the way and looked straight at me. A look of sly righteousness spread over his face.

When we left, Rose and me with Pammy and Linda by the hands, leaving Pete and Ty behind and taking the car, it seemed to me that we were fleeing. I kept saying, “Where are we going? Where are we going?” certain there was somewhere to go. But we went straight home, as if there were no escape, as if the play we’d begun could
not end. Since then, I’ve often thought we could have taken our own advice, driven to the Twin Cities and found jobs as waitresses, measured out our days together in a garden apartment, the girls in one bedroom, Rose and I in the other, anonymous, ducking forever a destiny that we never asked for, that was our father’s gift to us.

I
DON’T WANT TO MAKE TOO MUCH
of our mother by asserting that she was especially beautiful or especially distinguished by heritage or intelligence. The fact is that she fit in. She belonged to clubs, went to church, traded dress patterns with the other women. She kept the house clean and raised us the same way the neighbors were raising their children, which meant that she promoted my father’s authority and was not especially affectionate or curious about our feelings. She cared about what we did or failed to do—our homework, our chores, our share of the cooking and cleaning—and expected our feelings about these doings to rise and fall according to some sort of childhood barometer, irrelevant to her, having to do with “phases.”

We were given to know that the house belonged in every particular to her—that she was responsible for it, but also that damaging it was equal to damaging her. I remember once when Caroline was about three, she got hold of a lipstick and made large circular marks on the wall of the upstairs hallway. My mother was not forgiving of Caroline’s youth, nor did she blame herself for leaving the lipstick around. She spanked Caroline soundly, repeating over and over, “Must
not
touch Mommy’s things! Must
not
draw on Mommy’s wall! Caroline is a very bad girl!” Even our things were her things, and when we broke our toys or tore our clothes, we were punished. From our punishments, we were expected to learn, I suppose, to control ourselves. A careless act was as reprehensible as an act of intentional meanness or disobedience.

She had a history—she had gone to high school in Rochester, Minnesota, and one year of college in Cedar Falls—and for us this history was to be found in her closet. The closet was narrow and deep with an oval leaded window at the end. The closet pole ran lengthwise, and there was a single high shelf above the window. The wall that the closet shared with the closet in the adjoining room did not meet the ceiling for some reason, but was finished off with a gratuitous piece of oak trim. A pink shoebag hung from the door and slapped against it as the closet was opened. In each of the countless pockets of the shoebag rested a single shoe, heel outward. There were seven pairs of high heels that Rose and I counted each time we opened the closet. On the floor of the closet were two cylindrical hatboxes, and in these were eight or ten hats, some with flowers or fruit, most with half veils. Also in the hatboxes were four or five corsages with their pearl-tipped pins stuck into the satin-wrapped stems. We admired these, and picked them up and held them to our chests, always knowing that if we pricked ourselves with the pins, we had only ourselves to blame.

The fabric of the dresses was cool, and if you stood up underneath them, the crepey freshness of the skirts drifted across your face in a heady scent of dust and mothballs and cologne and bath powder. Although her present was measured out in aprons—she put a clean one on every day—her past included tight skirts and full skirts and gored skirts, peplum waists, kick pleats, arrowlike darts, welt pockets with six-inch-square handkerchiefs inside them, shoulder pads, Chinese collars, self-belts with self-buckles, covered buttons, a catalog of fashion that offered Rose and me as much fascination in its names as in its examples. The clothes in the closet, which were even then out of date—too narrow and high for the postwar “New Look”—intoxicated us with a sense of possibility, not for us, but for our mother, lost possibilities to be sure, but somehow still present when we entered the closet, closed the door, and sat down cross-legged in the mote-filled sunshine of the oval window. These were things of hers that our mother didn’t mind us playing with. We were out of her hair and we treated them carefully, as the holy relics they were. Now, when I seek to love my mother, I remember her closet and that indulgence of hers. Of course, of course, I also remember
Rose, my constant companion beneath the skirts, on whose shirt I carefully pinned the corsages, on whose head I balanced the hats, with whom I stood among the dresses, pretending to be ladies shopping.

After the church dinner, Jess needed a place to stay until everything blew over. Rose suggested that he stay at Daddy’s house, not in Daddy’s bedroom, of course, but in one of the other rooms. There were four bedrooms, after all, three going to waste in any circumstances. After she proposed this, it seemed like a good time to take a look at the house, straighten it up a little, put a few of Daddy’s things in a little bag, in case he ever wanted them.

I went over after breakfast one day, after sharing Ty’s wordless meal and hearing him recite his plans for the day and the incidental information that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He didn’t ask me my plans. “Fine,” I said, that red flag response, but he didn’t react. I waited until he drove away in the pickup, then headed down the road to Daddy’s. Ty may not have known that Jess was moving closer, was, in some sense usurping Daddy’s place. It was fine, too, that he didn’t know. If he had mentioned it, I would have told him that anything could happen now.

As I neared the house, it seemed like Daddy’s departure had opened up the possibility of finding my mother. It was not as though I forgot that I’d been there every day of my life. I knew that. But now that he was gone, I could look more closely. I could study the closets or the attic, lift things and peer under them, get back into cabinets and the corners of shelves. She would be there if anywhere, her handwriting, the remains of her work and her habits, even, perhaps, her scent. Might there not be a single overlooked drawer, unopened for twenty-two years, that would breathe forth a single, fleeting exhalation? She had known him—what would she have said about him? How would she have interceded? Wasn’t there something to know about him that she had known that would come to me if I found something of her in his house? The hope was enough to quicken my steps. I passed the kitchen display in the driveway, the white brocade sofa still sporting its tag, upended on the back porch. I ignored the fact that the place was depressingly familiar, that Rose and I had spring-cleaned there every year. There had to be something.

Already the attic was baking. It had never been insulated, and the reflective powers of the metal roof did little if anything against the summer sun. A path had been cleared to each of the four windows and the east and west ones were propped open to ventilate the house. Considering that our family had lived in this house for sixty-five years, there wasn’t much up here—a roll of carpet, almost-new gold shag that Daddy must have gotten somewhere—it was never laid in the house. Three floor lamps with those old twisted black cords and round Bakelite plugs. A folded-over mattress. Three boxes of back issues of
Successful Farming
. Another box of
Wallace’s Farmer
, dating from the early seventies. An old fan, its black blades unshielded by any grid. Under the eaves there were old-looking boxes, and in them some newspapers from the Second World War, including a copy of the Des Moines
Register
for VE Day. Folded into this was an invitation to my mother for a wedding in Rochester of some people I had never heard of. I smelled it. It smelled like the newspapers. Deeper in the box were farm receipts for 1945. The other boxes also held farm receipts and a few copies of
Life
magazine. Nothing else. I crawled back toward the center from under the eaves. My dusty shirt clung to my chest.